“... disregard for the rule of international law. He quotes General Mike Jackson, who toured Basra in May 2003 after the victory over Saddam. ‘It is startlingly apparent,’ Jackson reported to London, ‘that we are not delivering that which was deemed to be promised and is expected.’ Jackson was encouraged to keep his concerns to himself, since this was ...”

“... published a few years later, describes four voyages to the New World – the first of which may well have been invented – along with such further tokens of barbarism as Amerindians’ indulgence in sweat lodges and eating without tablecloths. More was reprising a genre in which tall tales were commonplace. Utopia, like Mundus Novus, describes American ...”

“... however true the collector’s expressed admiration, is always going to be unstable. The collector may or may not have the best eye, but he certainly has the best money. He then becomes a person who owns and displays the artist’s work, and perhaps donates it to the nation – or has it confiscated by the nation. At which ...”

“... from a dignified letter written by the artist Mary Kessell, it makes painful reading. Clark may have worried about these broken hearts and dashed hopes, but if so the evidence seems to have vanished.A major source for Stourton is Clark’s letters to Janet Stone, wife of the wood engraver Lawrence Stone, kept under embargo in the Bodleian but available ...”

“... meant. Williams seems to believe in the magic he so frequently describes; you suspect that he may even have performed some of the spells. In his sequence of ‘spiritual thrillers’, written mostly in the 1930s, he seems sinisterly close to his sinister villains; one of his early poems is an ironic hymn to Satan. Evil fascinated him a little more than it ...”

“... to constructing – or manipulating – cabinet support, before announcing the application in May 1967. The announcement created an expectation of devaluation, worsening the problems created by yet another downturn in the balance of payments. By October, the Treasury believed that devaluation was inevitable. It was finally conceded in November, with ...”

“... public debate about Occupy’s tactics). The greatest achievement of the post-Occupy conversation may be the unexpected success of Bernie Sanders. Running in a Democratic primary ran counter to the basic ideas of OWS, and at first Sanders wasn’t identified with the movement. By all accounts, he expected to run a protest campaign, a shoestring operation that ...”

“... the possible: you can’t have one even if you try, and you can have the other without trying. We may speculate that what he wanted was not to achieve the impossible, and still less to arrive at some comfortable middle space of possibility, but to manage something like an occasional, dazzling infraction of the logic of opposites: to find in effort some of the ...”

“... Life (which Heller-Roazen translated into English) designates this Roman figure as a man ‘who may be killed and yet not sacrificed’, a man who is ‘sacred’ in the antithetical sense of the word largely lost to us – accursed, at the mercy of all.* For Agamben the condition of bare life was precisely an exception, even if it has sometimes threatened ...”

“... and partly by implying that criticism is a vestige of colonial condescension. But Western opinion may be starting to turn against him, at least if Wrong’s book – and the favourable reception it has received – is anything to go by. And Kagame’s standing isn’t helped by his economic record. The supposed miracle he has worked over the last twenty years ...”

“... a fictional sequel or addendum, An Episode of Flatland, which wasn’t published until 1907. He may have anticipated being considered ‘not so much a heretic as an afterthought’.Hinton starts at a relatively late point in its protagonist’s life, with a number of his books already published and the disgrace of the court case in the past, as his family ...”

“... emerge.Historical debates have a way of coming back full circle, however. The French Revolution may no longer look like the hinge of world history, but many historians would put the rise of capitalism in that position. Indeed, the ‘history of capitalism’ has become a popular subfield, with its own conferences, journals and faculty positions. The ...”

“... It was​ the weirdest election of my lifetime. Theresa May, with the largest Conservative share of the national vote since Margaret Thatcher’s post-Falklands triumph in 1983, failed to secure a majority, while Jeremy Corbyn – reviled by most of his own MPs – made Labour competitive again, with a remarkable near 10 per cent swing in his favour ...”

“... courtroom, but the case that really launches his narrative is that of James Hadfield, who on 15 May 1800 was arrested in the Drury Lane Theatre after firing a pistol at George III as he was blowing a kiss to his subjects from the royal box. There was no question that Hadfield had acted with deadly intent. He had loaded his pistols carefully and aimed like ...”

“... inasmuch as with hardly an exception his pictures are atrociously hung & lighted’. ‘It may be said as a general thing that you never see the Tintoret,’ he wrote in an essay of 1882. ‘The churches of Venice are rich in pictures, and many a masterpiece lurks in the unaccommodating gloom of side-chapels and sacristies … some of them ...”